NEWS
By Sloane Brown and Sloane Brown,Special to The Baltimore Sun | September 27, 2009
With a James Bond party theme, it was no wonder the Hyatt Regency ballroom looked like a movie set. The room was swagged in white chiffon, with clusters of white couches and cube tables along the sides. Red velvet ropes cordoned off the back third of the room, which was elevated for the VIP section. "There's a bottle of vodka on every table here," said real estate developer Patrick Turner, noting the VIP bottle service. No set would be complete without its stars. And there were plenty, thanks to host Baltimore Ravens player Terrell Suggs.
FEATURES
By Michael Sragow and Michael Sragow,michael.sragow@baltsun.com | July 31, 2009
Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity. In the attention-getting plot, two straight men agree to have sex for the camera in order to win at Seattle's annual home-made porn festival, HUMP! - or, as it's called in the movie, Humpfest. At the end of each festival, the emcee, sex columnist Dan Savage, hands out awards and burns the offerings onstage. Director Lynn Shelton's observation of manly competition and fellow feeling lifts the blatant plot hook into funnier, more mysterious realms of human behavior.
FEATURES
By MICHAEL SRAGOW | June 6, 2008
With Standard Operating Procedure (opening today at the Charles), Errol Morris, who helped start America's documentary revolution with such celebrated films as The Thin Blue Line (1988), investigates a subject that already has, in his words, "a lot of fingerprints on it." He explores the physical and psychological torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, brought to light four years ago by a stream of abhorrent photographs. Morris persevered despite his knowledge that other print and movie journalists were laboring on the story, confident that his highly personal and idiosyncratic approach would produce unexpected results.
NEWS
April 13, 2007
M. CARROLL RAVER, writer, photographer, cinematographer and film director, died Monday April, 9th. He was 67. A native of Carroll County, Md., he attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he was a National Collegiate Athletic Association champion fencer. Early in his career, while at J. Walter Thompson Advertising (NY), he served as a copywriter, producer and director working on television commercials for national clients including Ford. Later, as an award-winning director and cameraman, he directed commercials for Hertz, General Motors, the U.S. Army, BMW and others.
FEATURES
By Michael Sragow and Michael Sragow,Sun Movie Critic | September 22, 2006
A celebrated writer doesn't always have the makings of a writer-director. Steven Zaillian earned his reputation as a screenwriter with Schindler's List, but as a writer-director his work is often clumsy or simplistic; even at the script stage, it's as if he's writing down to his limited powers as a film director, or else, as a director, is not getting whatever life or complexity he has on the page. In Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), his writing-directing debut, Zaillian sheared away the fascinating, complicated mesh of real-life characters in Fred Waitzkin's autobiographical book about being the parent of a chess prodigy, and constructed a hollow fairytale about the need to lead a free, well-rounded life.
NEWS
By DAWN C. CHMIELEWSKI and DAWN C. CHMIELEWSKI,LOS ANGELES TIMES | July 2, 2006
HOLLYWOOD / / Long before the summer thriller snakes on a plane slithers into theaters in july, potentially venomous fans started rattling. The film's title says everything you need to know about the plot: On a trans-Pacific flight, a Hawaiian mobster trying to eliminate a protected witness uncorks a carton of poisonous serpents. But as Web sites posted details during pre-production and shooting last summer, B-movie fans began to react. They wanted more creative snake attacks, more gore, more nudity and more of star Samuel L. Jackson's signature four-syllable f-bombs.